Here's The Latest Bitcoin Rival That's About To Hit The Market

Along with Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Etherium, Litecoin, we'll soon be able to add Kin — the digital cash created by messaging platform operator Kik Interactive — to the ever-expanding pile of cryptocurrencies.

XKik will put that new digital currency up for sale next month in an attempt to raise $125 million via an initial coin offering, the company said Tuesday. The offering will consist of 1 trillion coins, and would seem to imply a per-unit value of a fraction of a cent vs. Bitcoin's going rate of more than $4,500.

The sale, which begins Sept. 12, would mark the latest "initial coin offering," or fundraising by way of digital assets — a financing method that has gained popularity but drawn more regulatory scrutiny.

Kin will sit on the Etherium blockchain, and its total supply is 10 trillion units of currency. While it will join an increasingly crowded market — Coin Market Cap currently tracks 866 cryptocurrencies — Kik said the integration of Kin represents "the first mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency."

Cryptocurrency-related investments are rising in value too. For instance, the Bitcoin Investment Trust ETF (GBTC) has jumped by a factor of six in just four months.

IBD'S TAKE: As cryptocurrencies grow, they've become tougher to ignore by the financial industry's old guard. For more, read this story.

Ontario, Canada-based Kik, which has struggled to compete against Facebook (FB) and other deep-pocketed tech giants, intends to use that offering to develop an entire ecosystem based on the Kin currency and a digital economy that would exist among Kik's users.

Founded in 2009, Kik Interactive has about 15 million monthly active users, far fewer than its 300 million registered ones. More than half its active users are between the ages of 13 and 24. Kik hopes to steer those millions of people toward its digital currency, "potentially making it the most adopted and used cryptocurrency in the world," the company said in a release on Tuesday.

Kik, in that release, also said it had closed a presale round of $50 million in the digital cash to investors such as Pantera Capital, Polychain Capital and Blockchain Capital, which have become some of the bigger investors in the cryptocurrency market.

"Kik is by far the largest consumer company to enter the cryptocurrency space, and this is a seminal moment for the industry," Ryan Zurrer, principal and venture partner at Polychain, said in the release.

Kik said it hoped to promote the use of Kin through an incentives system called the Kin Rewards Engine.

Kik launched another digital currency, called Kik Points, in 2014 as an experiment, which ended last year. Earlier this year, the company said it had been looking for a way to make money that didn't annoy users with advertising or jeopardize their privacy via the sale of consumer data.

"In the future, users will be able to earn Kin by providing value to other members of the Kik digital community through curation, content creation, and commerce," the company said in a whitepaper in May. "Kik users will be able to spend Kin on products, services, and other valuable assets offered by merchants, developers, influencers, and other participants."

Kik Interactive also said that Kin would be "expected to trade" on cryptocurrency exchanges.

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